Abstract

The nonlinear optical properties of graphene oxide (GO) were investigated at 532 nm in nanosecond and picosecond regimes. Results show that two-photon absorption dominates nonlinear absorption process of GO in the case of picosecond pulses, while excited state nonlinearities play an important role in the case of nanosecond pulses. Additionally, we compared nonlinear optical properties of three different dimensional carbon-based materials (two-dimensional graphene, one-dimensional carbon nanotube, and zero-dimensional fullerene) in nanosecond and picosecond regimes, respectively. The nonlinear mechanism of GO is distinctly different from nonlinear scattering of carbon nanotube and excited state nonlinearity of fullerene.

Received 10 November 2008Accepted 18 December 2008Published online 12 January 2009

Acknowledgments:

This work was supported by the NSFC (Grant Nos. 60708020, 10574075, and 20774047), Chinese National Key Basic Research Special Fund (Grant Nos. 2006CB921703 and 2006CB932702), and the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (Grant No. 20070055045).